i get epiphanies, eh?

There was a time when I owned a jetboat, a jetboat with a 455 Olds no less, a four barrel carb and it liked gas, and the oiligarchs liked it too!

Anyway, it failed me once too often likely due to hydraulicing the valves and I swapped the motor out in one overnight effort, and I think it was during that long night in a shop that I had an epiphany and realized that inboard motors are a bad idea on a boat!

What happens when you’re a hundred miles downriver and the thing from hell burps it’s last burp?    If there’s an outboard on it you hook a ride and bring back a new one and tighten those two bolts by hand and you’re back Inabeezzinass!

So periodically in my existence I’ve been given these epiphanies and it sure is a pleasure when one hits you in the thinker-box!   My latest was a bit similar to that when I noticed how important a good trailer can be to your operation and general well-bean.

If you have a quality trailer and your pulling unit fails, you have the options of either getting the pulling unit repaired, (which can stop you for weeks and likely will) or just hooking up to a new unit, and carrying on as if if nothing went wrong. And this is no small advantage.

I’ve been stopped from my work as a fuelwood logger in peak season more once or twice due to some essential piece of crap failing and it’s a frustrating situation to put it mildly, and there is still a bit of damage on one of them that didn’t need to really happen!

It also hit me recently that I wasn’t investing enough in a particular segment of my equipment, the stuff that gets the wood from the bush to my highway machine, so that has to change too.   And a forwarding trailer doesn’t need to be pulled by a 150k forwarder either does it?   So the epiphanies just keep coming and when I’m 105 I will have most of it figured out just fine.

There’s one thing about epiphanies though: they sure make you wonder how you could be so dumb as to not think of them 20 years ago!   It seems some of us just put our hands to the plow and don’t bother with the thinking part all that much, and maybe my dad had a bit of a point when he told us boys, “you just don’t think!”

Epiphanies come in all shapes, sizes and colors, and can be things as simple as keeping some gloves in your glove box to putting things you’ll need in the truck as soon as it occurs to you, instead of stupidly believing you will remember to do it later, all the way up to remembering your anniversary, which although we are currently estranged, is today come to think of it!   And Maybe I missed an epiphany or two in that department too I don’t know.

Where these epiphanies of ours come from who knows but it’s just amazing the difference they can make in your existence on this rotating blue golfball we currently inhabit!

Another one currently what I would call an epiphany in progress is the realization that we have a super abundance of people who don’t feel like working. I noticed this when the guy at the chainsaw shop told me to come back later and the mechanic in town said a transmission install on my 1980 toyota had “electronics involved” and I have other examples too.   Perhaps what we are experiencing is the “rich hooker syndrome” where the “sex worker” gets rich and forgets what made her her money and slowly becomes poor again, only we aren’t quite at stage 3 just yet, mechanically speaking, and thanks to a zerohedge commentator for that seedy analogy!

So my choices are either to do all of my own mechanical work which means building a shop and stocking it with welder and hoist and all or simply ditching what doesn’t work and buying something that does.   I think most of us are concluding that option 2 suits them the best.   Only thing, it’s kind of hard to say bye to good ol’ “crankshaft” which has been your right arm for ten years.    However there does come a time I suppose when the pleasure ain’t worth the pain, and somebody out there is always looking for exactly the “parts truck” that’s currently mussing your hairdo.

So anyway, all that aside, i still haven’t met an epiphany i didn’t like! Might be a good name for my next dog, come to think of it!